‘9-1-1: Lone Star’ Aftershow: Inside Tommy, Judd, T.K., and Carlos’ Endings (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the 9-1-1: Lone Star series finale “Homecoming.”]

“That sounds like us, two civilization ending problems descending on us at the same time,” was Jim Parrack‘s reaction to the 9-1-1: Lone Star series finale script, which sees the 126 dealing with an asteroid coming to Austin, then a nuclear reactor on the verge of a meltdown.

But even once those problems are taken care of, there’s the matter of wrapping up the characters’ stories. For Tommy (Gina Torres), who found out earlier in the season she has cancer, that was finding out whether or not she’d survive. First, she has to make it past jumping in to help during the nuclear emergency. “It’s her last hurrah. She’s going to go out fighting for herself and fighting for everybody else,” Torres tells us as part of our 9-1-1: Lone Star aftershow, First Response. “If she can help, it’s just in her DNA, it’s what she’s going to do.” (Watch the full video above with Torres and Parrack. Plus, check out our in-depth finale coverage with Rob Lowe here and co-showrunner Rashad Raisani here.)

Not only does Tommy survive, but the five-month time jump reveals she’s in remission. “I demanded to know” Tommy’s ending, Torres tells us with a laugh before admitting, “They were very clear that Tommy was going to make it, but that they were going to take it all the way up to the edge. And I knew what that would entail, but I wasn’t necessarily thrilled with — it’s not fun to play sick for that long, and the crew’s like, ‘That was great. Yay.’ It’s just such a downer. So you do your best to bring some gallows humor into it, but it’s exhausting.”

It’s not until the finale that best friends Tommy and Judd actually share scenes related to her cancer; he helps her when she collapses at the scene of the nuclear reactor, then he stops by after she finds out she’s in remission.

Gina Torres and Jim Parrack in '9-1-1: Lone Star'

Kevin Estrada/FOX

“I would’ve loved to have done more with them, but the way that our show ended up going, Judd ended up being his worst crisis moment when Tommy kind of needed him most and so he wasn’t able to give that kind of help to her,” Raisani explains. “To be honest, I wish we could have dramatized it more. But once we were in Episode 9, we were also dealing with Carlos [Rafael Silva] finding the guy who killed his dad, and that was a two-episode arc. Then we came back and we had three episodes to end the series. I wish we could have done more with the two of them, but the way it shook out, that was the moment where we could finally get Judd plugged into Tommy’s life on that front.”

There’s also good news for Judd in the finale: He’s now captain of the 126 with Owen (Lowe) moving to New York. (The series started out with Judd the only member of the 126 to survive a call.) “It was kind of bittersweet because I knew that wouldn’t be an era we got to go tell the story of,” Parrack says of his character’s ending. “But I thought it was good storytelling to be the original member and to have made this new family and these new bonds.”

The series ending with Judd as captain “was always on our minds, that it wouldn’t feel right if it was anybody but Judd,” says Raisani. It “was always the plan, but changed quite a bit, particularly when Sierra [McClain] dropped out of the show, so he didn’t have Grace. Obviously, his last season had to reflect that, the fact that she wasn’t there. And so then it became, how do we use the debacle in his life, that losing her to this even good cause was, as fuel to get him where he needs to be as a captain and as a human being? And so we decided to use his journey with alcoholism as a way to show that he’s an incredibly flawed man, all of us are, but that he can come back from his flaws and he allowed himself to be humbled by them. That is what really prepared him to have the compassion and humility to be the great leader that I think he’s going to be when the series closes.”

There was also a job change for T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein) — he’s now a stay-at-home dad, with him and Carlos adopting his half-brother Jonah.

“Because T.K. wants it so much, he knew that he would have to make the sacrifice,” says Rubinstein. “I think he’s at the point where his priorities are a little different. It’s now starting a family with the man that he loves rather than continuing his work as a first responder. And we know how much he loves that and how passionate he is about that. So it truly means a lot for him to step away from that.”

He adds, “I think Tarlos deserves a happily ever after they’ve been through everything and have still managed to come out at the end as incredible men, incredible partners, incredible professionals, and then I would think incredible fathers. It’s really beautiful full circle, and I’m so happy with how they ended it.”

Silva agrees: “And I don’t think there’s ever a bad time to give visibility to families that look like T.K. and Carlos. There is never a bad time to bring it to center and front and shine the spotlight on people that are in a same-sex relationship who are just trying to have more love in their lives by adopting kids, by having kids. It doesn’t make them extraordinary. In fact, I think the search is to explain how beautiful it is to be in an ordinary situation where you can just adopt kids without facing so much unnecessary adversity, so much false adversity because of a false narrative that has been created about a community that is based on love.”

Ronen Rubinstein as T.K. and Rafael Silva as Carlos — '9-1-1: Lone Star' Series Finale "Homecoming"

Kevin Estrada/FOX

Torres, Parrack, Rubinstein, and Silva are all on board to reprise their roles in the future in some capacity (9-1-1, the potential spinoff, or a revival).

Parrack shares he’s gotten to know 9-1-1‘s Aisha Hinds, Kenneth Choi, Ryan Guzman, and Oliver Stark (the others besides Choi appeared in the Lone Star crossover in Season 2) and he loved working with Raisani, Tim Minear, and Brad Buecker. “I’d be happy to just pop in anytime they wanted me to. It’d be cool,” he says.

For Silva, it’s about “when the timing is right. It has to be an addition. It has to add to the narrative. It can’t just be gratuitous.”

Watch the full video above for much more from Torres and Parrack on the finale, their characters, and the series as a whole.

9-1-1: Lone Star, Streaming Now, Hulu

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